Historic Hotels & Inns in Wisconsin

Ways in

Themes in Wisconsin

Milwaukee and Walter Schroeder’s hotels

Milwaukee has seven of the state’s historic hotels. The Pfister, designed by Henry C. Koch, opened in 1893 as the ‘Grand Hotel of the West,’ and the 1929 Knickerbocker was built as an apartment hotel near the lake; the rest are conversions of the Pabst Brew House, Northwestern Mutual’s 1885–86 home office, a 1907 bedding factory and the 1937 Mariner Building, now Hotel Metro. Milwaukee hotelier Walter Schroeder built a chain across the state: the Hotel Retlaw in Fond du Lac (1922–23), the Hotel Northland in Green Bay, which opened in 1924 as Wisconsin’s largest hotel, and the 25-story Hotel Schroeder in Milwaukee (1928), now Hilton Milwaukee.

Door County’s resort inns

Door County’s resort era began in 1896, when Dr. Herman Welcker built the Henriette in Fish Creek as the first lodging of a German-style health resort; it’s now The White Gull Inn, and his casino, the former Lumberman’s Hotel moved across the ice from Marinette, is the Whistling Swan. Freeman Thorp’s widow Jessie began renting rooms in their Queen Anne house after his death in 1903, in Ephraim the Oleson family’s log house grew into the Hillside Hotel, and in Baileys Harbor the Zahn family rented rooms in August Zahn’s stovewood house, now the Blacksmith Inn.

Lake resorts and company towns

Walter J. Kohler built The American Club in 1918 as a dormitory and club for Kohler Co.’s single immigrant workers, part of the planned village of Kohler he developed with architect Richard Philipp and the Olmsted Brothers; it’s now the company’s flagship resort hotel. On Elkhart Lake, Siebkens grew from 19th-century hotels, its oldest guest building the 1873 Lake Cottage. In Lake Geneva, The Baker House was Emily Baker’s 1885 Queen Anne summer home, then a sanitarium annex and, after 1925, a lakeside hotel.

Madison, Frank Lloyd Wright country and the Driftless

Madison has three: the 1857 Mansion Hill Inn, The Edgewater, a 1948 Art Moderne apartment hotel on Lake Mendota, and Hotel Ruby Marie, an 1873 saloon and rooming house. In the southwest, the Usonian Inn in Spring Green is a roadside motel near Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, designed by Taliesin-affiliated architect J.C. Caraway, and Mineral Point’s Commerce Street Brewery & Hotel fills George W. Cobb’s 1854 stone warehouse. In La Crosse, The Charmant Hotel fills the Joseph B. Funke Company’s 1898 candy factory.

Road trip

Milwaukee to Door County, inn to inn

Milwaukee

Start downtown at The Pfister, opened in 1893, or at Hilton Milwaukee, the 1928 Hotel Schroeder, or sleep in the Pabst Brew House. Pick one from our Milwaukee guide.

Cedarburg

Stay on Washington Avenue at the Stagecoach Inn, a cut-stone hotel of 1853 that’s now a nine-room B&B with a pub, or at the 1886 Washington House Inn; book a room in its main building.

Kohler

Book The American Club, Walter J. Kohler’s 1918 club for his company’s workers, now a resort, and ask for a room in the main building rather than the Carriage House.

Door County

Finish in Fish Creek, Ephraim or Baileys Harbor, and bring the car. Pick an inn from our Door County guide, and in summer reserve a White Gull Inn fish boil ahead.

Context

History and architecture

Wisconsin’s historic hotels follow its industries and its summers. The oldest building we list, Charles D. Cole’s store in Sheboygan Falls, went up in 1848, the year of statehood, and Cedarburg’s stone Central House, now the Stagecoach Inn, went up as a hotel in 1853, a year before George W. Cobb built his warehouse in Mineral Point. In Milwaukee, Pabst built its Brew House, Northwestern Mutual its 1885–86 home office and the Pfisters their hotel, opened in 1893. Summer visitors came next: Emily Baker built her Lake Geneva house in 1885, Allen C. Fuller his Bayfield summer home in 1890 and Dr. Herman Welcker began his Fish Creek resort in 1896, while lumber money paid for Frank Boutin Jr.’s Bayfield mansion and Frank D. Stout’s 1912 island lodge. Walter J. Kohler opened The American Club for his workers in 1918, Walter Schroeder built hotels in Fond du Lac, Green Bay and Milwaukee in the 1920s, and The Edgewater opened on Lake Mendota in 1948.